DeskPictRotator Pro Support

The answer to your question may be right here!

Here are some common questions about DeskPictRotator Pro.

Why does the desktop flash when a picture is set?

The Appearance control panel, which is what sets desktop pictures, requires separate commands to set the picture and to set the picture positioning (filling screen, etc.) The second command, to set positioning, is what causes the flash.

Some pictures do not scale to fill the screen. Why?

There appears to be a bug in the Appearance control panel. When specifying 'Filling Screen,' Appearance seems to always use 'automatic' as the positioning mode. Perhaps this will be fixed in a future release, but I have verified the problem through MacOS 9.1. If you're a scripter, the following script shows the problem:

set picture positioning of monitor 1 to filling
set actualP to (picture positioning of monitor 1) as string
display dialog "Picture positioning should be \"filling\" and is \"" & actualP & "\"" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
end tell

Note that the result will be "automatic." One possible workaround is to scale the picture using a graphic program so that Appearance will be forced to fill the screen. One graphic program I like is MicroFrontier's Color-It! (I have no connection to MicroFrontier; just a happy user.)

When I drop a folder onto DeskPictRotator Pro, my system appears to hang for a few seconds. What's going on?

As DeskPictRotator Pro iterates through a folder, it attempts to resolve any aliases it finds. If there is an alias which points to a file server which is not available, the system will briefly hang while it attempts to resolve the alias. It should eventually recover, and DeskPictRotator Pro should present an error dialog.

I am getting crashes which appear to be caused by DeskPictRotator Pro. What could be wrong?

We know of a few things that can cause problems.

Some third-party programs will improperly install older extensions (this is a general problem, and may affect other software too). One problem extension in particular is ObjectSupportLib, which lives in the Extensions folder within the System folder. Under MacOS 8 or higher, this is redundant (it's integrated into the System file), and should be deleted. Simply drag ObjectSupportLib to the trash, and reboot. (Please note that at some point Apple may release an update for ObjectSupportLib, and then it would be proper to have it in the Extensions folder. However, at this writing (Feb 2001), we don't know of any such update. For more information, you can try searching the Tech Info Library.)

There may be a corrupted picture in your pictures folder. This can cause Desktop Pictures (8.0, 8.1) or Appearance (8.5+) to crash. To verify a picture (be aware this can cause a crash), drag the picture file to the desktop picture preview area of either Desktop Pictures or Appearance. If the picture preview appears correctly, chances are the file is fine. If the file is suspect, you should remove it from DeskPictRotator Pro's picture list.

DeskPictRotator Pro may be critically low on memory. If you are seeing frequent low-memory warnings, you should allocate more RAM to DeskPictRotator Pro. Please refer to either your Macintosh documentation or the DeskPictRotator Pro manual for information on how to do this.

Sometimes I get an error that the Appearance control panel can't be launched. Why?

We've seen this in a couple of cases. One is where system memory is low, so that it would be difficult to launch a new application, and the other is when the Mac's desktop database needs to be rebuilt. As a rule, launching the Appearance control panel manually, and then restarting DeskPictRotator Pro will cure the problem.

I tried to delete a picture from the list by dragging it to the trash, but the picture didn't go away.

DeskPictRotator Pro doesn't support removing pictures that way. To remove a picture, select it in the list and press the Delete key, or choose Clear from the Edit menu.

I have set a desktop picture, but it draws very slowly!

When the Mac is running low on memory, desktop pictures will redraw very slowly, and there may be display anomalies. You can remove the desktop picture, using the appropriate command in DeskPictRotator Pro's Special menu, then quit DeskPictRotator Pro and the Appearance control panel until more memory is available. Another possible cause is that the picture is very large, and the Mac may be having trouble scaling it to fit your screen. In that case, you might try using a graphic program to scale the picture to a more appropriate size.

What about a MacOS X version?

"I bought the MacOS X release, and it does not appear that there is support for changing the desktop picture from a program. In MacOS 8.5 through 9.1, desktop pictures are set through the Appearance control panel, and there is a supported Apple Event. In MacOS X, desktop pictures are set through the Finder preferences, but there seems to be no way to set the picture other than a user interactively changing those preferences. I will continue to look into this, and monitor future releases of X." -- Rich

Wasn't the script called DeskPictRotater?

Yes. We realized that "rotater" is an incorrect spelling, so we changed it for the Pro version to DeskPictRotator.

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